On this site we often forget that the best players in the world play a different game and look very differently at courses than we do. For those players, Brandel is spot on with his comments. When there are no real pros or cons for hitting the ball 300+ yards in the fairway vs 300+ yards somewhere else 30 or 40 yards off line, is that great architecture? For 99% of us, it might still be but for the best players it is not. I played this past weekend at my home club, which is a fantastic old William Flynn, with a guy who had 180+ mph ball speed and carried his driver 320 yards. He hit the ball in spots I had rarely ever seen before. The course, which was soft from some rain, had little defense for him. Angles didn’t matter, the height of our rough didn’t matter, even some of our trees didn’t matter. Even if the course was firm it probably wouldn’t matter. On our one dogleg par five (550 yards from the tees we played) lined by trees on the right, he flew his tee shot over all of them and had 130 yards into the green. He hit a sand wedge for his second shot.
For 99% of us, Lehigh and many many others courses are fantastic and we love and appreciate all the angles, the width, the strategy, the ingenious golf architecture designed into the golf course. But for the best, who play a different game, they see things very differently.
This is a constant struggle for courses that are primarily designed for 99% of us but also hold tournaments for the best players in the world once a year or once every five or ten years. We can only move our tees back so far and I sure don’t want someone messing with Lehigh just so we can make the course more interesting and challenging for that 1%. But as Brandel correctly says, to do so, changes would need to be made and unfortunately the other 99% wouldn’t love them.
Tournament only courses, change the ball/equipment, …, we’ve discussed many of the options but this is where the game is right now at least for the top players in the game.